Dating from early times, Alsace became known as the wine-cellar, granary, and larder of the surrounding countries—a paradise and a garden eminently favourable for good living. Charles Gérard has proved the local Dumas, and his volume, besides its erudite presentation of the resources and olden customs of the country, contains many interesting gastronomical anecdotes, such as "Favourite dishes of celebrated personages," "Influence of a Rhein carp on a financier of the school of Fouquet," "Frying, its nature and effect on manners," etc. Assuredly should a nation be credited with a natural aptitude for gastronomy which in the early part of 1700 could devise an omelette of brook-trout (Forellen Eyerkuchen) and cold pâtés of trout (Forellen Kalte Pasteten), to say nothing of a certain pâté of fish (Pâté de langues de carpes et foies de lottes) composed of the tongues of carp, eels' livers, and the tails of crawfish—the invention of a Strassburg Koch, which he served to the Cardinal de Rohan, and which M. Gérard defines as the supreme limit of epularly eminence.
The researches of M. Gérard place the national dish, Sauerkraut, as an invention dating from beyond the middle ages and proclaim its origin as distinctly Alsatian. The date of the frog's leap into the frying-pan he places in the year 1280, and specifies Alsace as the discoverer of his edible qualities. The potage bisque or bisque d'écrevisses has long been known to the epicures of the province, while the merits of stuffed crabs were pointed out in the "Oberrheinisches Koch-Buch" of Frau Spörlin, wife of a Protestant minister of Mulhausen. Among the strange customs described is that appertaining to the olden festival called Hirztag, at which time women and maids alone had the right to appear in the inns and liquid dispensaries and avail themselves of the privileges extended to men in eating and drinking. On these occasions any of the male sex who was brave enough to appear was seized, stripped of his hat and coat, and obliged to pay forfeit by a round of wine—a usage thus described by the poet Moscherosch:
"Spitze Schue und Knöpflein dran,
Die Frau ist Meister und nicht der Mann."
(With jaunty button'd and pointed shoe,
Gretschen will riot it over you.)
No work on cookery in the German language, it is true, has obtained a great reputation outside of its own country. But although the Teuton is a midday diner, a custom that must prove inimical to gastronomical perfection and thereby the highest social evolution, it were extremely unjust to charge him with a lack of understanding in eating. On the contrary, no one, not even the Gaul, enjoys eating and drinking more than he, or eats and drinks amid pleasanter surroundings during a large portion of the year. The open-air restaurants and beer-gardens are a feature, and a most delightful feature, of German life. In the shaded bowers of the Wirthshaus, under the umbrage of horse-chestnuts and limes, to the plash of fountains in suburban Gasthof gardens, amid the consonance of viols and reeds in the attractive temples of Gambrinus, do the Germans voice the refrain,
"Isz, trink, sei fröhlich hier auf Erd',
Und denk nicht dass es besser wird."
(Eat, drink, be merry, seize the present hour,